I am writing this on the eighth day of sobriety since my last relapse – a planned four-day holiday from my work, my responsibilities and indeed my mind. Regular readers of this blog will know all about my contrarian approach to sobriety, but if you’re new, you may wish to check out this article, and this one, for some context.
The first thing to note is that four days quickly turned into nine days. This in itself is not remarkable – any time I open myself up to one of these ‘strategic relapses’ (as a good friend of mine recently termed it) there is always the potential to miss my target sober day. Much as the typical drinker’s intention to have only ‘a couple of drinks’ after work on Friday can easily become an eight-hour bar-crawl that decimates the wallet and writes off the weekend, so too can the serious drinker’s best intentions to limit his bender to a long weekend completely evaporate on day-five, as he glumly weighs the relative immediate rewards of pulling the pin and getting back to work versus pouring a good stiff gin and going back to bed to drink off the hangover ‘one more time’.
There are many differences worth noting between the ‘typical’ and the ‘serious’ drinker – the most crucial one being that most folk do not tend to continue drinking heavily for a week or more after a big night on the booze. But there is a crucial similarity here also – the cognitive process that occurs when the ‘typical’ drinker opts to stay out drinking until 1am on Saturday morning instead of getting home by dinnertime on Friday night, is the same as that which causes the ‘serious’ drinker to reach for the bottle again on day-five. It is the abdication of imminent responsibility and the sacrifice of future wellbeing in favour of immediate reward.
Nine days… And each day (not to mention the painful, self-loathing week since) was ripe with lessons and insights for the addict seeking ascension. It is in fact one of the arch ironies of this topic, that one can gain some of the most startling and profound insights into one’s psychology and problematic behaviour while deep within the grips of that very behaviour.
I could talk about the way it turns you into a liar (both to yourself and others), or how it completely screws up your homeostasis – everything from circadian rhythm to bowel function, or the destructive effect it has on interpersonal relationships… But all of these are byproducts of the core, immutable truth of self-induced intoxication, that is: it robs you of your self.
I have written about this before and discussed the dependance cycle of addiction that occurs when we forgo personal responsibility in favour of pleasure. So it is by no means a new insight, but it remains the most crucial lesson I have taken from my ‘usage’ and as such warrants further acknowledgement and exploration – for otherwise, what is the purpose of any of this writing?
When we drink and use drugs, we opt to put aside the things that make us who we are (family, vocation, passion, purpose, etc) and artificially pleasure ourselves instead. This removal of personal responsibility leads to a period of inaction which usually encompasses the time we spend intoxicated and its aftermath. This in turn leads to anxiety as tasks and commitments build up (and let us not forget – this anxiety is usually augmented by the attendant physical discomfort of a hangover or drug withdrawal). This can then lead to further consumption of our drug of choice in order to allay the anxiety. This leads us back into the pleasure zone, and this then leads to a further lack of personal responsibility, which leads to further inaction, which leads to a compounding level of anxiety, and so on.
In this way, what begins as an ostensibly harmless indulgence can quickly become a complete loss of self. I am in fact only just retrieving my ‘self’ as I write this article despite having been sober now for over a week. For even in the aftermath of our indulgence we can remain paralysed by inaction – all those things we put off while we were getting drunk or high loom over us, and it can take some days to summon the willpower to open that email, or step on the scales, or, indeed, to begin writing this very article.
I had aimed to get this post-relapse analysis done a week ago, but while I was sober this time last week, there was zero hope of me opening the laptop and beginning work on this piece – I was in a state of withdrawal and mental anguish (and I also managed to get sick while I was on my bender – possibly with Covid, I don’t know, I’ve not done a test – and I still have a lingering cough; yet another delightful and common side effect of extended alcohol use).
It is a strange and scary thing. Not so much the nine days I spent drinking – this was simply the unfortunate extended self-pleasuring sequence of an addict who had starved himself for 80 days and snapped back too violently in the opposite direction. My inattention to this blog during that time, and to the various other projects which bring meaning to my life, is entirely par for the course. What’s more telling is the subsequent week of sobriety that it took me to regain enough belief in myself to begin writing again.
This is what inaction does to us – we sit there feeling like a fraud and a failure even after we’ve put the bottle down, and in this period of recovery it’s often touch-and-go as to whether we’ll pick ourself up and get back to work, or opt for another day of oblivion.
And even if we don’t, all this inaction makes us anxious. And we then turn that anxiety inward on our self, causing us to question practically everything about our self – the point of our job; the value of our ideas; the worthiness of our endeavours; indeed, even our own fundamental self-worth.
Getting drunk and high robs us of our self.
It is not a new lesson, but it is a timely refresher and a damn good kick in the ass which has both reminded me why I went to such lengths to curtail my drinking in the first place, and got me questioning whether my current approach is even sustainable.
Bouncing back after four days would have been relatively easy, and while I am once again sober, I failed in that regard. This inability to regulate myself at crucial junctures means that my method of sobriety is not working for me the way I want it to, and it means I must continue to evaluate its viability. To take a more blasé approach would amount to the very kind of self-justification that lives at the heart of every addict.
My continued flirtation with the bottle is solely contingent upon my brutal honesty in this regard, and part of the point of this blog is to make myself more accountable through my readers – so I cannot sugarcoat this and play it down.
My last strategic relapse was a failure.
But it’s not all bad. Here I am again, almost eight days sober and back at my writing – and wouldn’t you know it? Having completed this piece, I’m already feeling 100% better than I was this morning.
And this really is the true lesson from my relapse. Yes, drinking and drugs rob us of our self, but so too can many everyday things – setbacks, failures, negativity and boredom. What matters in the end is what we do next.
Maybe we’ve neglected a loved one while we’ve been using; maybe we’re behind on work; maybe we’ve blown our diet or exercise regime; maybe we’ve fallen behind on a personal project. Maybe it’s simply that the house is a mess… Whichever thing is weighing heaviest on the mind, simply getting up and addressing that item will orientate us back onto the path out of inaction and anxiety and back towards our self.
Take action. This is the lesson worth remembering. Even when we fail, and disappoint ourselves and others, and are left seething in the mire of our own self-loathing and anxiety: Take action and you will feel better.
Take action, and you will once again start to become yourself.